People Who Lost Their Jobs To AI Are Opening Up About Their Experiences, And It's Genuinely Scary

""Voice actor here. While I still get the bigger commercials and jobs, I've lost a lot of the smaller jobs. For example, storyboarding. Ad agencies will create a digital storyboard detailing what the ad will look like. They'd hire a voice artist to do a preliminary voiceover (you'd earn like $150 to $200 for the hour), but it's all AI now. I've worked on campaigns where all voice artists refused to sign their contracts because of a new clause. If they sign it, they're signing the rights of their voice over to AI, so this client can use their voice without them ever having to record anything else again. They all refused; the client just recast all of them.""

""AI decimated my income from eLearning narration. Knew it was coming, but work quite literally dried up this year.""

""I worked for a major US-based insurance carrier. I wasn't actually fired, but they started pushing a lot of people out the door, and I left before I could be next. For the last few years, AI has been the big push. Being able to generate a policy without ever needing to speak to a human, and if you file a claim, being able to submit photos, get an estimate, and payout instantaneously and with minimal human contact was the goal. So they started implementing fully automated systems, laying off the most tenured employees, and driving up the workload for everyone else. My department (the fraud department) started using AI to scrape claim files, looking for fraud indicators to generate cases and then assign them out. It worked okay for some cases, but terribly for most others...but the company didn't care. They laid off the entire intak""

Voice actors are losing smaller gigs as agencies replace preliminary voiceovers with AI-generated audio and insert voice-rights clauses that allow reuse without further recordings. eLearning narration income has sharply declined and work has dried up. Audiobook work is increasingly being replaced by AI voice. Insurance carriers are automating policy creation and claim handling to minimize human contact, using AI to scrape files for fraud indicators and generate cases. Automation has increased workloads for remaining staff and led to layoffs despite uneven AI performance on complex tasks.

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